Dish CEO Charlie Ergen leaves the state court building in Manhattan yesterday.Daniel Shapiro

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A Dish Network executive yesterday stormed out of the courtroom sobbing after being insulted by the judge — only to return and launch into a finger-wagging verbal assault on a Cablevision lawyer.

In a wacky series of events in Manhattan state court, Dish programming boss Carolyn Crawford turned on her heels after dressing down Orin Snyder and, according to eyewitnesses, moved toward the exit and tapped the back of Snyder’s elderly dad and barked, “I hope you are proud of your son.”

That prompted Snyder to accuse Crawford of roughing up his father and he asked that cops be called.

It certainly was a zany day in Judge Richard Lowe’s courtroom where Cablevision is suing Dish Network for $2.4 billion for improperly scuttling its Voom HD joint venture — but the antics away from the jury took center stage.

After the escalating series of encounters, cooler heads seemed to prevail and the NYPD was not called.

Tempers began to flare in the afternoon, when Judge Lowe said he shouldn’t have allowed Crawford to sit in the courtroom because she is too integral to the case.

The hard drive of a computer and documents on them belonging to Crawford — who worked on the Voom joint venture — went missing not long after the Voom venture folded in 2007.

Lowe ordered that her current hard drive be seized and said she should no longer be permitted to observe the trial.

“That woman has been in this courtroom since day one,” Lowe said, “and if I had known what her position was in this case, I would never have permitted her to sit here in this courtroom.”

Soon after Lowe’s comment — and after the judge apologized — Crawford left the courtroom in tears.

The executive returned and, after testimony ended, approached lawyers at the bench, witnesses said.

“She ran up to the bench and [Snyder], sobbing, talking about her reputation,” an eyewitness told The Post.

For days, Snyder has launched assault after assault on Dish executives. On Friday he told the judge: “What’s disturbing is Carolyn Crawford, we know, as I told your Honor yesterday, double deleted from her delete file some of the e-mails that are the most important evidence in this case.”

Crawford wagged her finger at Snyder and the judge as she got into it with them at the bench, said the source.

It was after this exchange that Crawford had the run-in with Snyder’s dad, prompting the Cablevision legal eagle to say, according to witnesses, “She just pushed my father. Call the police.”

Thomas Claps, a litigation expert at Susquehanna Financial, said, “There are so many sideshows and side issues being litigated during this trial that the likelihood of a mistrial is increasing.”

Cablevision and its former subsidiary AMC are suing Dish Network’s EchoStar for pulling out of what had been a 15-year deal to distribute HD programming.

EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen, who was cooling his heels in the courthouse waiting to testify, never did get onto the stand yesterday.

Wall Street is keeping close tabs on the trial because it wants to gauge the effect on publicly traded AMC Networks, which is not currently carried on Dish.